Lainey Wilson Breaks Record at CMA Awards

There’s a new queen of country music!

Lainey Wilson broke a record after claiming the CMA Awards Entertainer of the Year Award for 2023. She joined a group of ten other artists who won Entertainer of the Year on their first nomination, and she is only the third female artist to win on her first nomination after Shania Twain and Taylor Swift.

Wilson is also the first solo female artist since Taylor Swift to win Entertainer of the Year, Vocalist of the Year and Album of the Year in the same year (Swift did so in 2009 with “Fearless”). She’s now one of the eight women who have ever won the Entertainer of the Year Award joining the ranks of Dolly Parton, Reba, Loretta, Taylor, and Carrie Underwood. In total, Wilson took home five CMA Awards for the evening.

Heading into the award show, Wilson had the most nominations of any artist for the evening with a total of nine. In her acceptance speech for Entertainer of the Year, Wilson shared, “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do, it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

She went on to say how the number nine might be her lucky number. “That’s how many times we were nominated for the CMAs this year,” she stated. “But it’s also the year that I wrote my first song. It’s the year that I got my first pair of bell bottoms. It’s the year that my mom and daddy brought me to Nashville for the very first time and took me to the Grand Ole Opry for the first time. It’s the year that my mom and daddy brought home this horse named Tex and the horse was, it was wild and it needed breaking and they put me on the back of that thing and they said ‘You better hold on, you better ride.’”

Wilson ended her speech by thanking the audience for “letting me be me.”

Here is the list of all winners from the CMA Awards.